Ivanka Trump and the Grab Your Wallet Effect
Branding & Associations: Brand collaborations refer to different brand’s working together to create a product. Building a relationship between brand’s is becoming more popular as a strategy to boost awareness and enhance the audience’s perception of each individual brand. The benefits of this relationship can be examined through analyzing the different ways in which brand relationships are beneficial. Potential value proposition of such brand relationships Awareness: One of the main issues new brand’s face is a lack of awareness and the inability to reach new customer’s due to budgetary constraints, with 80% of new business’ recognizing that “finding new customers” is the main challenge to growth (Richardson). As such brand collaborations/associations allow brands to work together in addressing this problem. Building relationships between brands through collaborations, sponsorship or associations is an effective way of reaching new audiences and enhancing profile. Brand collaboration results in exposure to the partner brand’s audience and vice-versa, providing mutual benefit, important in over-saturated markets. The fashion industry is well known for its brand collaborations, and is a prime example of the beneficial nature of mutual exposure. This is exemplified through the relationship between Missoni (high-end retailer) and Target (mass-retailer). Missoni benefitted with the exposure to thousands of new clients, whilst target benefitted in terms of perception, altering their image of being cheap/mass produced to win-over the fashion-conscious audience. Target Market: When navigating a new audience, it is important to have partner’s that already have knowledge and understanding. Through increased exposure also comes a less familiar demographic. The benefit of a brand partnership is that at least one of the partner’s is familiar with the demographic and can help the other in breaking into this new market. How might these relationships tarnish/flourish and what lessons are there for brand managers in managing such situations? Highlight your points with theory and by exploring a practical example. Managing brand associations/relationships requires careful consideration on behalf of the brand manager as the effect of external forces inhibiting one brand can inadvertently extend to affect the other. This idea can best be examined through an analysis of public relations. Public Relations: Public relations is defined as the maintenance of a favorable image by a company or organization. Earning and maintaining a relationship with consumers is difficult. When bad publicity emerges businesses often suffer and are portrayed as being irresponsible or only looking after their own interests. As a result, brand managers need to be careful in choosing which brands to endorse, as a wrong decision could result in a loss of consumer trust and profit. This is exemplified in the Ivanka Trump #grabyourwallet, movement in late 2016. In protest of the Trump administration twitter users tried to build awareness and politically protest against the Trump family by attacking Ivanka Trump’s brand, executing a boycott. Sales dropped by 54.4% in the three months after the election with the hashtag reaching over 496’000 re-tweets. Not only was brand equity compromised, but Trump’s relationships to major retailers was also tarnished. Nordstrom, a major US retailer dropped the brand shortly after due to falling sales and presumably to also distance itself from the negative PR. Inadvertently Nordstrom was effected by the fall in Ivanka Trump’s popularity both in terms of their own sales and the public’s perception of supporting the Trump movement, resulting in negative brand association. Brand association refers to the deep-seeded attitudes or feelings a customer has for a product. Consumers are alienated from the brand and often switch to other competitors. In the case of Nordstrom this could result in retailers moving to other luxury high-end retailers, leading to a bigger loss in profit. Using this example it is clear that brand manager’s need to carefully consider who they partner with as poor decisions could lead to an unexpected loss in profit due to the fallout from negative public relations. ''